Rethinking the Right - Part IV

by Julius Evola

In this fourth installment of a series of Julius Evola’s meditations on the postwar Right, the Italian Traditionalist argues that a true Right must be grounded in transcendent and spiritual principles derived from Tradition — the metaphysical order that orients society “from the heights and toward the heights.” Only by reestablishing this hierarchical, sacred worldview can the Right overcome modernity’s materialism, egalitarianism, and decay, transforming conservatism into a “revolution from above” rooted in eternal values rather than historical inertia.

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The Right and Tradition

The idea of the Right today is awakening interest in wide and various spheres. Given the political and cultural marasmus of present-day Italy, this is certainly a positive sign. However, whenever an idea begins to resonate, it happens that it increasingly loses its exactitude, and the formula comes to count for more than specific content. The same can be said also for the idea of the Right, especially insofar as it is referred to planes beyond its origin (that is, the political), and comes to be taken as a general attitude.

In this context, the problem of the relation between the concept of the Right and that of Tradition might acquire a special interest. It is necessary to bring attention to this point if one wishes to give a positive content to the Right, rather than a merely polemical or oppositional one.

The merely polemic content of the Right was implicit in its origins. Indeed one recalls that the Right was so named in relation to the place occupied by those assembly members who had aligned themselves against the revolutionary elements; while the revolutionary elements were for this same reason characterized as the “Left.” In the assemblies of the anciens régimes, however, this opposition was not between elements of comparable force. Indeed in general those regimes were monarchical, and the Right did not act on its own behalf, but assumed the defense of the superior principles of authority and of order eminently seated at the very zenith of the State. Moreover, in its origin even the so-called “opposition” had a functional character, because loyalty and cooperativism was presupposed in its representatives—an idea which is characteristically expressed in the English formula: His Majesty’s most loyal opposition. Only at the appearance of ideologies and revolutionary movements did one come to define the Right and the Left as entirely counterposed formations. In such a situation, it was naturally proper to the Right to assume a conservative orientation.

With this we have already delineated some essential concepts for the entire problem that we intend to consider. With the twilight of the “ancien régime,” a higher positive principle of reference partially failed, or became uncertain. It is easier to specify what the Right does not want and what it combats on the political plane, than that which it wants and wants to defend; and in this respect divergences of some importance might arise.

Even when one speaks by extension of a cultural orientation and of a life-vision of the Right, the purely negative definition is the most manageable, though it be evidently incomplete. The introduction of positive principles is necessary to give force to any true antithesis between Right and Left—principles which at the end of the day cannot have anything but a “traditional” character. Yet one must specify exactly how to take inspiration from the concept of a particular and eminent tradition; and thus it has become common, for more than merely rhetorical reasons, to write the word Tradition in the uppercase when outlining a corresponding current of thought.

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Indeed, a generic traditionalism of empirical or merely historical character does not suffice. But often the political Right can offer nothing else. We have indicated that this Right is naturally “conservative,” and therefore also “traditional,” taking its inspiration, that is, from a given system of principles and institutions that one wishes to maintain or to safeguard. On this level one remains evidently in the field of factuality and also of relativity, for one refers case by case to that which one has simply inherited. It is for this trait of inheritance alone that one attributes value to it, its quality as a thing to conserve and to preserve.

But a broader and more elevated conception is possible, which takes its reference from constant values of universal nature. Such values can furnish the positive content of a true Right. In this acceptation the concept of Tradition is applied to a system in which “all activities are ordered, as a matter of principle, from the heights and toward the heights.”

In consequence, the natural and fundamental presupposition for a “traditional” Right appears to be the admission of the reality of a superior order, which has also a deontological, that is to say a normative, character. In antiquity, one could speak of an over-world opposed to the world of becoming and contingency. Religion therefore could form its basis. Here, however, the existence of a positive institutionalized religion such as a Church might appear as a limiting condition: the practical danger arises that this Church might then monopolize spiritual authority (this is the orientation which historically provoked the Ghibelline “dispute”).

Thus it is preferable to keep oneself to a more neutral plane, to express only subordinate references of a strictly religious character and to employ instead the concept of “transcendence.” Transcendence, that is, with respect to whatever is simply human, physical, naturalistic and materialistic, but which is not for this reason detached and abstract, so that, almost paradoxically, one might speak of an “immanent transcendence”; for one must relate oneself also to a real formative, energizing and organizing force, a force precisely “from the heights” and toward the heights. In this one might indicate the final point of reference of the traditional orientation, lying beyond every one of its particular expressions and concretizations.

Consequently, the background for any true Right which also has “traditional” content, the background for every corresponding vision of the world and of life, should analogously be a spiritual background. Only by keeping oneself to this plane can one thereby furnish a foundation and higher legitimization to every particular position of a traditional Right. This Right cannot be other than hierarchical and aristocratic. It can do no other than pose well differentiated hierarchies of values, and affirm the principle of authority; it can do no other than oppose itself to the world of quantity, of the masses, of democracy, of sovereign economy; it can do no other than emphasize that which truly merits commitment, that to which it is truly worth absolutely subordinating one’s own particular interest, so that one might have an anagogic virtue—that is, a virtue which directs toward the heights (“toward the heights” as counterpart to “from the heights”). And this precisely on the basis of an anchorage in the “other,” in super-ordered reality. It has been justly observed that personality in the eminent sense does not exist when it is not open to the super-personal; this corresponds precisely to the spirit and the climate of the Tradition.

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Certainly, for the formation of such a Right, which will in any case not exhaust itself in mere politico-social positions (these ought to be defined and to matter only in consequence), a great work of demolition would be required, and vocations and qualifications would become necessary which today are not easy to find. Courage would be also necessary, in some cases not merely of the intellectual kind. In this connection a paradoxical convergence might appear between traditionalism and revolution. But “conservative revolution” is not a new term: it was even the designation of an interesting politico-cultural current of pre-Nazi Germany. Conservation in this sense refers to nothing present, but rather to basic ideas of a perennial currency (Möller van den Bruck).

With respect to today’s modern civilization and society, one can effectively say that nothing has a revolutionary character like the Tradition; one is speaking here, in good Hegelianism, of a “negation of the negation”—the second negation being that which we owe to “progress,” which has brought us to where we today find ourselves, by desecrating everything, by subverting every normal order. This is the negation to be negated.

Thus another watchword might be met for the traditional Right: “revolution from the heights”—the opposite of all these protesting anarchoid velleities of the day, which culminate in vain or insane agitation because they lack a positive counterpart. Their exponents are indeed incapable of so much as conceiving of such a counterpart—even when they do not find themselves, openly or unconsciously, in the orbit of the ideologies of the left, or when they are not being exploited by the same.

If one casts one’s glance to what is or has been designated as Right, a few clarifications are necessary on the basis of what we have said. The Right has been characterized in terms of economic forms associated more or less with capitalism, the which have served as a convenient target for Marxism and for the other forces of subversion. A disgraceful descent in level is evident here, even if one must recognize that in this very material sphere there are structures which should be con- served and defended. Speaking more generally, there is a Right defined by a predominately conservative orientation in the bourgeois middle class—which has been the case particularly in Italy. The points of reference in other nations, on the other hand, bring us back, in part, to the higher level before indicated. The traditional French Right has been essentially Catholic and monarchic, even if reservations might arise with respect to a certain genre of Catholicism a là Charles Maurras, and in particular when such a religion comes to be considered as more than a merely political background of the Right.

A species of monarchical mysticism is implicit in the Right of the Anglo-Saxon Countries. These countries have not been constrained to Catholicism, but Protestantism has likewise been able to make itself felt as a point of reference. The Protestant Bismarck was no less paramount an exponent of the true Right than the Catholic Metternich, or the Catholics Maistre and Donoso Cortés. A certain secular retrogression must be observed in Prussianism, however, for its references to the transcendent are veiled. One finds rather in the first place a species of autonomous ethics, a traditional, congenital characterial formation which apparently has a force of its own, but which at bottom—in the emphasis it gives to what is super- personal—would not know how to truly justify itself if it were not, so to speak, the derivative of a precedent orientation which possessed a spiritual background (one might recall that Prussianism with its ethics was born as a secularization of the Order of the Teutonic Knights).

One sometimes speaks of the Right also in reference to political systems of the “fascist” type. Here however one must formulate some reservations. It has been observed, most fittingly in a group of essays dedicated to the European Right (The European Right edited by H. Rogger and E. Weber, University of California Press, 1966), that these systems cannot be called “Right” in the ancient and traditional sense of the term, that they are rather characterized by a mixture of the Right with the Left; for if on the one hand they have defended the principle of authority, on the other they were based on mass parties, and they incorporated the “social” and revolutionary demands proper to the Left—demands against which the men of a true Right would certainly have taken a stand.

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More generally, it is a distortion to attribute the character of the Right to dictatorship, for dictatorship as such has no tradition, being as it is a formless constellation of the potency in a given individuality (dictatorship here understood as a type of constitution, not as something transitory imposed in situations of crisis or of emergency). Machiavelli’s Prince incarnates nothing that one can call Right; rather, we find in him an inversion of relations, since if the Machiavellian leader might take inspiration from spiritual or religious values, he does this only by adopting them as simple expedients for his government, without any intrinsic recognition of their worth.

The same argument could be extended to those principles, possibly of a superior order, which in the framework of dictatorial totalitarianism might nevertheless fall under the species of simple “myths”—that is, having in view exclusively formulations apt to cause or canalize the irrational forces of the masses. It is not necessary to underline that the Right and demagogy are irreconcilable.

All these observations confirm the importance of the connections, indicated in the preceding, between a true Right and the Tradition.

After all that has been said, if one must conceive of a “culture of the Right,” one ought to recognize as one of its paramount tasks highlighting the values of the Tradition, and distancing itself, in the meantime, from every merely “traditionalistic,” that is to say conformistic, orientation. The field of the culture of the Right is potentially quite vast. The historiography and the morphology of civilizations could play an important part in it, because, rejecting every historiography of liberal, Marxist, and progressivist tendency, it would be necessary to systematically highlight everything which in previous periods incarnated traditional principles, so as to make its paradigmatic character evident.

Valid contributions have already been furnished above all by that current which takes as its head René Guénon, the true master of modern times. Within the limits of our possibilities, we have dedicated ourselves to a not dissimilar task, insofar as we have sketched, on the basis of comparative research, a species of “doctrine of the categories” of the “World of the Tradition” in the first part of our work Revolt Against the Modern World (1934; 3rd ed. 1969).

Once strong points of axiological reference have been fixed, it would become the task of a culture of the Right to study also their possible applications to the current state of affairs. The danger of a sclerotic conservatism should be overcome by adopting the principle of homology. Homology does not signify identity but correspondence—not exact reproduction but transposition and reaffirmation of the same formal principles from one level to another, from one situational complex to another. If we wish to employ an image, consider a stream, wherein a whirlpool which has disappeared at one given point returns to form itself at another point, in obedience to one and the same law: it is identical but at the same time different, precisely because it is in a fluid medium—like time, like history—that these whirlpools take shape.

This general methodological indication might be concretized in the consideration of the various fields of problems which a culture of the Right ought to confront, so as to build schemata valid also in praxis. It is here important to hold the line, not ceding to the temptation of accommodating positions, such as might assure a wider, but less select, resonance. We must remember that we do not work only for today but also and above all for tomorrow. Here we might make reference to Hegel’s words: “The idea has no haste.”

These considerations are not superfluous, because the idea of the Right today seems to have achieved, as we observed at the beginning, a certain vogue; and this has often brought one to label very different and even spurious attitudes as belonging to the Right. This attests in any case the absence of a rigorous and coherent line of thought. Yet such a line is mandatory if one is to speak of something more than mere improvisations, and also if one is not to limit oneself to political positions—if one wants, that is, to define also an existential and general cultural orientation.

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The above text is an excerpt from Julius Evola’s Recognition: Studies on Men and Problems from the Perspective of the Right, brought to you in English by Arktos:

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